Place Research: Following the Water

1.

I came into the process of researching place with an open mind. With curiosity, without answers.

In the past, research has meant color coded under-lining in academic texts.

Now, I am coming into research meaning an exploration of a practice in a new way. Of giving myself a prompt, and allowing curiosity to lead the way. And so that’s what I did.

The prompt I gave myself was: wherever I was, find the ocean.

Why the ocean?I started with what I missed. I grew up in Newburyport, Massachusetts, a small coastal city to the north of Boston that is nestled in the elbow where the Merrimac River meets the Atlantic Ocean. Living inland for the last 6 months, I have missed the ocean. I have come back to it time and time again.

What can I learn about my places and myself by taking myself ritually to the ocean wherever I go? I photographed, I sketched what I saw. I looked at maps. I sketched what I remembered. I closed my eyes and listened. I wrote with frozen, fumbling fingers.

I want to share with you snapshots from my journey.

2.

It actually started on a boat.

I began with a frigid, end of day sail in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

An invitation from a new friend as a surprise, it was spontaneous and thrilling.

Sitting in the boat in Jamaica Bay, where the East River and the Hudson River meet the Atlantic Ocean, I remembered my mother, her steady hands holding the lines as she sailed. Her sturdy feet planted as she squinted and looked up the mast. Her strong shoulders.

3.

Next, I journey home to Newburyport, MA.

It’s Thanksgiving, and I bundle and drive to Plum Island, the barrier that shelters the marshes and the land from the unforgiving Atlantic waves and tides.

4.

The orange tape and tilted sign-posts are a reminder of the fragile, shifting dunes. That this beach is changing rapidly - shifting under my feet and reassembling elsewhere.

5.

An older man and his dog walk by me, ask if I am a photographer. I say no, just taking pictures, and then wonder to myself: If I feel like a photographer, aren’t I one?

6.

Looking out at the raging waves I feel all the years of walks on this beach with my family, with my father - a sculptor and a musician - talking about the creative practice, what it means to create as we look out at the ocean.

I take a deep breath.

I feel a root growing inside me that is giving myself permission to create.

7.

After Thanksgiving, I take myself to Brooklyn - to the sprawl I have spent the last 5 years immersed in. On another crisp, cold, bright day, I drive South to Jacob Riis beach.

I breathe in the salt air and sketch a map of the five boroughs and mark the places I have frequented to find connection, grounding, resilience: Interceptor Park, the Staten Island Ferry, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Concrete Plant Park, Coney Island, Jacob Riis beach, Snug Harbor, Socrates Sculpture Park, Red Hook, Breezy Point.

They all touch the water. I take a deep breath.

8.

I sit on a bench and sketch what I see, until I hear a voice call to my left “Are you a mermaid?” A fisherman has set down his things a few benches away.

I say no, I’m just a human, but then wonder to myself: if I feel like a mermaid, aren’t I one?

We chat, he shows me his drawings of the Rockaways, he tells me about life growing up here.

“Never did I imagine I’d be back here,” he says.

9.

I sit on a bench and draw, and as I draw, I feel the seed of permission to create start to take root.

10.

As I’m walking down the beach back to my car, I receive a text from a friend named Jake, telling me he has just gotten into Berkeley! And did I know his parents named him after Jacob Riis beach, the beach I was standing on? I think about him, and the new oceans and horizons he will soon find. I think about my own.

11.

I travel to Charleston, South Carolina for a family wedding, and take myself to a foreign beach further south than I am used to, for a family that I am coming into claiming as my own.

I walk by myself along the shores in the rain, the sand one reflective slick that erases the seams between land and sea.

12.

The waves are tumultuous, powerful, dangerous and serene.

I take a deep breath.

13.

I talk to my grandmother, my mother’s mother, on the couch in my aunt’s bedroom. We talk about her happiness and fulfillment in being a mother. We talk about her first love before my grandfather.

14.

She says “my family, my children, they’re my life. I live for them. I was born to be a mother.”

She tells me that if one of her children dies before she does, she won’t make it. We wonder aloud if I will have children.

15.

On the last cloudy day, I take a walk on the beach with my dad. As the sun bursts out from behind cloudy skies into a double rainbow, we stroll and talk. “I’m confident that whatever creative direction you go - design, art, or anything’ - you'll do it well.” I consider his confidence. I look at the sea and think about my own.

The root continues to take shape.

16.

I travel to Falmouth, Maine, where Casco Bay opens into the Atlantic, where the other half of my extended family is gathered to celebrate Christmas.

In the late afternoon, 12 of us bundle and drive to Mackworth, a small island in Casco Bay, and walk its perimeter. I feel the pull together of our shared love of this place. I feel rooted.

I talk to my paternal grandmother, Nana.

She tells me about building a home and a community in Maine.

Her love and connection to the water. She talks about her children, raising a family, returning to a career afterwards and an unusual husband who stuck by her side, despite his flaws. We talk about her love of paintings and the opera, her adventures in the woods of New Hampshire as a young girl. We think about a good death.

17.

As the year closes, I travel back to my home beach.

The ocean is calmer than I have ever seen it, barely a ripple against the shore.

I walk the shores with my dad.

I sketch, I write, I take a deep breath.

18.

Back at home,I sit with my mother on her bed as she is feeling ill and we talk.

We cry about illness together. We talk about how she made decisions, how she chose to have children, and about feeling hopeful about the world: hoping that women will take over and make everything better.

Without me prompting, she says: “where do I come from? Well, originally, we all came from the ocean.”

I feel the root again, growing.

19.

As 2019 comes to an end, I travel back to Brooklyn.

On New Year’s Day, I make a pilgrimage to Brighton Beach. With dark clouds above and a shimmer of golden light on the horizon, I plunge into the water.

It is freezing, and brisk, and I think about my mother and her love for the cold water, and my grandmothers and their love for their children, and I feel new and old at the same time.

These places, Brooklyn, Newburyport, Falmouth, where a river opens up to meet the vast ocean - maybe these are my places. My homes that are grounded in the earth but as expansive as the horizon.

So what have I learned?

My time with the Atlantic Ocean at many touch points, and with many of the women in my family shook something loose in me about my power to create. I feel a growing root - a root within myself that is trusting, is permissioning creation in a way I haven’t before.

I have also learned that the ocean is my safe harbor, and I come from lines of women who find this harbor too.

And when I look to them - with so many accomplishments (my mother, who started a public montessori charter school with her neighbors on a whim and founded it from the ground up, who became a partner for a community yoga center on a whim and stuck with it for years), I marvel at the fact that of all that she has created, the thing that she is most proud of, is her family. I am struck by their wisdom. I have learned that I want to have children.

When I look at the ocean, it is constantly moving, altering, changing form, never still. Water has the ability to morph and adapt, to hold everything and nothing. It is also the hand that touches every shore - that weaves a web between every rock and crag on this earth.

I’ve learned that I am adaptable. Like the ocean, like water. The ocean is where I go to know myself as a creator. As a woman. Isn’t that home? This must be the place.